Columbia Versus the Economy

One thing I learned as a newspaper editor is that if you have to phrase the headline as a question, the answer to the question is probably "no." Such is the case with a Bloomberg View column that runs under the headline, "Is Modern Finance Ruining Modern Art?"

The author of the column, the chair of the department of religion at Columbia University, Mark Taylor, writes about the relation between art and money: "During the past several decades, however, this relationship has been transformed by the appearance of a new form of capitalism: finance capitalism. In previous forms of capitalism -- agricultural, industrial and consumer -- people made money by buying and selling labor and material goods; in finance capitalism, by contrast, wealth is created by circulating signs backed by nothing other than other signs."